


damned and free

by jasondont (minigami)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Order 66
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26198749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: Two years after the end of the war, Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard is no more. Fox, on the other hand, has found a home and a mission, if not redemption.
Relationships: CC-1010 | Fox/Quinlan Vos, Riyo Chuchi/CC-1010 | Fox
Comments: 13
Kudos: 95





	damned and free

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from feel good inc., by gorillaz (i know. i know.)
> 
> this was going to be longer and with an actual plot but i really do not have the time to write that. the idea itself has been in my brain for two months and change and it partly stems from the fact that i am completely unable to choose between the two pairings.
> 
> hope you like it!

  
The insides of the dinner smell of old grease and tabacc smoke, but the food is not awful, and when Fox crosses the threshold, his hands firmly inside his pockets and a scowl on his face, nobody looks at him twice.   
It’s late, and the place is mostly silent, if not empty. There are two teenagers sitting at one of the tables, slowly working through a plate of something deep fried with the tired air of someone who has been there for a while and has nowhere better to be. There’s a cracked screen on the wall behind the counter that displays an old episode from holonovel that even Fox recognises, the sound muted.

It’s very late, even by Coruscant standards, but under the city’s surface time moves differently. Shops open and close whenever their owners want, and most places, like the dinner, never close at all. The waitresses come and go, but its lights stay on, yellow and too bright in the undercity’s eternal twilight.

Fox has a place close by. It’s in the depths of an abandoned apartment building, a long-condemned structure whose owners have forgotten about. It’s been slowly crumbling for at least thirty years, and Fox is sure it’ll last at least for thirty more--he checked, just in case.   
The apartment there is one of the best hiding places he has appropriated throughout the years. It has water if not electricity, no one else lives in the building, and it’s easy to go in and out without anybody else realising--there’s an old utility elevator in the back that’s connected to Coruscant’s mains. Fox had to slice the records so that it didn’t show --it wouldn’t do if some busybody administrator thought to check and found out that someone had been using the elevator regularly for months--, but that was almost an afterthought.  
By now, he spends a lot of time there--it’s where he keeps his armour and all the other things he hasn’t managed to let go of. 

He really, really doesn’t want to have to move.

“Vos,” he says. The Kiffar opens his eyes and straightens his back from its slump. He looks rough--tired, dirty, on the edge of too thin. There’s an empty mug of caf in front of him, and when he blinks the sleep from his eyes, it could be easy to believe he’s as exhausted as he looks.   
Fox knows him too well. He crosses his arms, and when the other man smirks at him, he feels his scowl deepen. 

It might be a coincidence, the fact that Vos asked him to meet in a dinner that’s so close by to the only place Fox has been able to even think about calling home in two years.  
But Vos is an asshole, and he moves through the city, through the galaxy, with the ease of a feral cat. Force-sensitives may be hunted, but the former Jedi has been ghosting the system for too long. He’s just too good to be caught.

“A bit louder, please,” Vos drawls. He sprawls on the bench, his too long hair grazing the dirty seat. For once he’s wearing something with sleeves, a dark leatherette jacket with a suspicious stain under the left arm. It fits him too well to be anything but stolen. “I think there’s a couple senators up top that didn’t hear you. Take a seat, please, _Commander_.”  
Fox clenches his jaw.  
He sits down.   
One of the waitresses --Twi’lek, must be in her early thirties, missing the tip of her right lekku-- leaves a mug of caf in front of Fox without saying anything. He nods his thanks and grabs one of the flimsiplast menus.  
He’s hungry --he always is, lately-- but he won’t be eating there. He looks the menu over anyway.

“What do you want?”   
Fox has never had a lot of patience--he has even less for Quinlan Vos.   
The Kiffar’s smile widens.  
“Oh, you know. I’ve missed your pretty face.”  
“If that is so, you could have gone to the Senate. There are some of mine still working there, or so they say.”

Fox checks every two days. Yesterday, Thire was still alive, and still in command of the few clones that are still allowed to work on Coruscant. Most of them have been phased out, decommissioned, or moved to other positions, out in the Rim or in training facilities or to Vader’s personal task force. 

Vos blinks--for a beat, he looks almost serious.   
“I thought your… brothers were all gone,” he says.   
Fox breathes. In and out.  
“They are. What did you want?” he asks again.

Vos sighs. He straightens on his seat and crosses his arms.

“I’m looking for a friend’s nephew. He ran away from home a couple of years ago, but an acquaintance of mine told me he’s living around here.”  
Something touches Fox’s boot under the table--Vos’s own booted foot, nudging against his instep, once, twice. A second later something slips into his right pocket: a datachip.  
Vos doesn’t move his foot afterwards. It stays there, under the table, hidden from view from the rest of the dinner. He feels warm through his trousers. Fox’s scowl deepens, but he doesn’t move his leg away.  
“This place is dangerous for kids,” Fox says. In the reflection of the window on his left, he can see the screen. The program has changed--there’s a man wearing a dark robe talking to the camera.   
“It is.” Vos isn’t looking at the screen, but he has noticed as well--his whole demeanour has changed. It’s subtle, all in the shoulders, but Fox is very good at reading body language. 

“I’ll keep an eye out,” he says, his voice softer. 

When he attempts to stand up, Vos hooks his foot around Fox’s ankle. The clone stops, his palms against the sticky dinner table, and looks at him, head slightly tilted.

“What.”   
Vos just looks at him for a beat, quiet, smug smirk firmly in place but something very different lurking in his dark eyes. He finally moves his foot, and Fox stands up, removes himself from the booth.  
“Nothing. Keep an eye out for my friend’s kid, will you?” Vos says.  
Fox snorts.  
“No promises.”

When he leaves, he notices someone has turned off the holoscreen.

*

When he gets home, to the little apartment that he has managed to make his and that he’ll soon have to abandon, there’s already a message from Vos waiting for him. Fox leaves his boots and the thick, reinforced leather jacket by the door, switches on the light, and then pads silently to his datapad. The place is small and bare, but it’s also warm, and clean. There’s a small fresher unit tucked into a corner, a small kitchenette in the corner opposite. He took the cot where he sleeps from the old barracks, the ones that used to be near the temple, and he found the little desk and the chair that rest under the boarded-up window in one of the other empty rooms of the building.  
Everything in there is his. He’ll have to leave most of it, if not everything, when he empties out the safehouse.

Fucking Vos.

But that will come later. Fox takes out the datachip from his pocket and inserts it in the pad before even reading the message, and then sits down on his chair, socked feet on the desk, and waits while the decryption program does its job.   
When it ends the pad pings. Fox puts his feet back on the floor and swipes at the screen to turn on the small holoprojector.

The kid must have been around twelve when that holo was taken. They look between sulky and awkward, their serious little face full of impatience. Fox cannot see a Padawan braid anywhere, but that doesn’t mean anything--the robes are unmistakable. 

Vos has found another one. 

*

Fox’s days go like this:

He wakes up. He drinks some water and then goes down to the cellar and works out for two hours. He then goes up back to his room, where he eats his breakfast of stale caf and ration bars and has a shower.   
What he does afterwards changes depending on the day. Sometimes he stays in the undercity, following leads and talking to contacts and trying not to get into trouble with the gangs. Other times he stays at home, in one of his safe houses, slicing into Imperial databases and updating his security protocols.  
Very rarely does he venture to the surface. The Coruscanti underworld is dangerous, but being up there, where he can be recognized, is even worse. It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of planning. He has a suit of stormtrooper armour in the safe house that’s closest to the surface, but he knows it isn’t enough. 

He’s not going to the Senate building. 

Fox spends most of his day going through floor plans and patrol times, memorising CorSec itineraries. He could send a message but this is too important, too dangerous to trust to a holonet connection--he needs to go himself.

Two hours before sunset, he lies on his cot and tries to nap for a while. He manages to fall asleep, but wakes up barely ten minutes later, sweaty and shaken and with his mouth full of sharp-tasting bile.  
He throws up in the fresher, spends almost fifteen minutes slicing into the Senate personnel database, checks that Thire is still alive, and then showers again, grabs his bag and leaves.

*

He didn’t schedule his own surgery until the medics began to disappear. 

Not all of them vanished, of course. They were fighting a war, they had been fighting a war for three years, and in wars people die. Especially medics. The Separatist army had been targeting medical centres since the early months of the conflict: droids may be scrapped, their parts reused, but a human being, even an artificially made one, takes longer to make and train and grow.  
So yes, medics die. Sometimes they even disappear. But not like that, and never, ever on their own. 

Fox packed himself a bag, dug up his stack of contraband credits and called up a couple of favours down in the lower levels, and then, one night, he locked himself up in one of the infirmary rooms of the Guard Headquarters with a brain scanner and a reprogrammed medical droid and emerged from it half an hour later with a badly shaved head and a new scar.  
He didn’t say anything to anyone, even if a tiny voice in his head wouldn’t stop telling him he really should. 

He drowned it out. He couldn’t afford to trust anybody, he told himself. He couldn’t trust anyone but himself, not even his own brothers. How could he be sure none of them would talk? They would not believe him, they had no reason whatsoever to believe him, someone they obeyed, maybe respected, but despised--he had not believed Fives. So he kept quiet, and he kept watch, and he guarded his stashes with the obsessive attention to detail that he had learned in Kamino and the previous three years had only reinforced. 

And he had waited for the thing he fears would happen, even if another tiny little part of him told him he’d finally gone mad.

*

The first few weeks after the whole brain chip debacle were the longest and the worst of Fox short life until that point in time. He had always kept to himself, perfectly aware of his precarious position both within the GAR and the Senate Guard, but from the moment he shot ARC Trooper Fives it stopped being something that he had voluntarily chosen and began to be something imposed on him. The nat-borns looked at him with eyes that said they didn’t really understand how he could have shot one of his own brothers, and his brothers didn’t really look at him anymore.  
Fox understood. He probably would have acted the same way in their place. 

At first, he held onto the certainty that he had done the right thing: for a few days, he actually believed that killing Fives was the right choice. The man was out of his mind, armed and dangerous and unstable. He had two superior officers trapped in a fucking ray beam and he was spouting nonsense and when trying to de-escalate the situation didn’t work, Fox did what none of his men dared to and took the shot.   
He could have stunned him. Maybe he should have. But the only way forward for Fives had been jail and then, very probably, to be taken back to Kamino, for decommissioning or something worse. They all had heard the stories about what happened to non-functional clones--Fox, however, had the privilege of knowing most of them were true.

And the thing was, he had actually liked the Chancellor. For years, Sheev Palpatine had been one of the few kind faces he saw day in and day out in the Senate building. He never made him wait needlessly, and he was respectful and talked to him like he actually thought there was another human being under the helmet. He had noticed the way he was amassing power bit by bit, but he hadn’t thought anything about it: he was a politician, after all, and after so much time guarding their backs Fox had learned to not expect much from them.   
Once upon a time he had thought, naively, that the galaxy could do much, much worse than Sheev Palpatine.

He would have remained blessedly blind to the truth if he had been a different man, or if he had had an actual support system, if he hadn’t been so alone.

But Fox was alone. And Fox was paranoid, and obsessive, and drowning in a mix of guilt and shame and frustration. So Fox double and triple checked every possibility, and Fox planned, and then Fox waited, praying, hoping to be wrong.

He wasn’t.

*

He doesn’t know if she knows who he is. Under the helmet he could be anybody--that’s the point of the clunky thing. She always treats him with the kind of distant politeness that didn’t use to be there when he first met her, and he sometimes thinks she can see right through his borrowed armour, through whatever disguise he’s managed to throw together.  
Fox doesn’t know whether that makes things better or worse.

She looks beautiful, if tired. Pretty and petite, violet hair carefully coiffed, tunics and dresses and cloaks humbler than they used to be but still high quality enough to be distracting by themselves. Riyo Chuchi hasn’t changed at all save in all the ways she’s a completely different person to who she used to be two years ago. When she looks at him from the depths of her cowl, her golden eyes are flat, almost blank, and she stands with her spine straight and her hands under the folds of her short cloak, close to the disruptor gun that hangs from her belt.

She doesn’t trust him, even if she thinks she knows who he is. She will help, if she can, but he doesn’t think Chuchi trusts him. 

That’s fine. Fox can work with that.

His breath is too noisy in the insides of this borrowed stormtrooper helmet, but when he speaks, his voice distorted through its vocoder, he sounds calm and cold and professional. He tries to flatten his accent when he talks to her, to make the Concord Dawn twang disappear.  
“We are still looking for the child,” he tells her. The datachip with the Jedi youngling’s information is in his fist. “But when we find them, we’ll need to be fast.”  
Chuchi hums. The only thing Fox can see of her face is the glint of her eyes, the tip of her nose, her pointy chin. They are on the upper level, in the roof of her building, hidden from Coruscant’s sleepless night by the remains of what used to be a small hothouse. His stolen swoop bike rests under the remains of what he’d swear is a stunted wroshyr tree. When he’s done there, he’ll take it to the Works and wreck it somewhere.  
He’s actually looking forward to that.

“I cannot help you to find them,” she says, her voice low, slightly raspy.   
Fox already knew that. He keeps silent, waits for her to continue. By now, he knows the texture of her silences as well as he knows the exact shade of her hair--he knows she’s thinking.  
“I may be able to arrange a transport,” she finally says. “What kind of timeframe are we working with?”  
“Once we find them, we can hide the child for a few days, maybe a week,” he tells her. “But the longer they’re there… “  
“I know. I understand, “ she says.   
Fox can hear it when she opens her mouth, the soft exhale that preludes whatever she’s going to say before she changes her mind. Her jaw clicks then, and she turns away, looks in the opposite direction, away from Fox.

This is dangerous for her. More than it is for Fox. If he’s found out, they’ll just kill him. What they’ll do to her is much, much worse.

He makes sure to make more noise than it’s necessary when he closes the distance between them, his borrowed armour clicking and clacking away, his boots scuffing in the dry, dead dirt. She turns her head to look at him, and a curl escapes from her cowl, soft and pale against the night lights. She has to tilt her head up to look at him, her eyes searching ineffectually for the face under the helmet, and her cowl slips back.  
Fox looks away. He very carefully puts the datachip in the metal railing between them, and she lowers her gaze once again.  
“This is what we have on the child,” he says. He clears his throat, looks away. “It’s not much.”  
She laughs, soft and humorless, and covers the datachip with a gloved hand. When she moves again, it’s gone.

This is when Fox usually leaves. They cannot risk being seen together. It’s exactly the same as it was, before, except in all the ways it’s infinitely worse. 

She puts her hand on his wrist.

“Do I know you?” she suddenly asks, her voice small. She’s looking at him, he can feel her gaze through the plastoid, and for half a second he almost says yes.  
(Yes you know yes I miss you yes it’s me.)

“No, you don’t,” he says. And she removes her hand from his arm and he turns away and mounts his bike and leaves her, alone under the dead tree, and goes back to the eternal twilight that is now his life.

*

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he likes to play a game with himself. It’s like telling stories, but lonelier. He tries to imagine what would have happened if he had trusted his brothers, or her, if he had told someone. Or if he hadn’t killed Fives. Or if he had decided to not take out his chip. Or if he had gone that night to the Supreme Chancellor’s office when he saw the Jedi arrive, grim and determined, and put a shot in the _demagolka_ ’s head instead of looking, horrified, at what was going on from the security booth two floors down.  
It’s an awful game, with no winners and no losers, and Fox’s gotten extremely good at it.

*

“The kid works as a slicer, of all things. Right now he’s on his own, but he’s too good, he’s beginning to attract the dangerous kind of attention,” Vos says from where he's sprawled on Fox’s cot.   
“Black Sun?”  
“And the Hutts.”  
Fox grunts. He doesn’t turn to look at Vos, his eyes on the screen of his datapad. He’s sitting on his desk chair just in his underwear, and the plastic sticks uncomfortably to the skin of his legs, to his back.

The gangly teen that he sees on the security cam video is very different to the child from the old Temple Archives picture. They are tall but too thin, their narrow back hunched while they eat. They’re at a street stall not very far from there, and the timestamp tells Fox the footage is from a couple days ago.   
“You’ll be the one to approach them,” he tells Vos. It’s not a question. Force knows what the youngling will do if they see Fox; from what they’ve been able to find out, they were in the Temple when Order 66 was transmitted. That they managed to survive is nothing short of a miracle.  
“Obviously,” Vos says, and when Fox looks at him over his shoulder he catches the end of his eye roll. 

The low light fits the Kiffar. He’s all golden tattoos and long limbs, his hair dark as ink flowing over his shoulders. He sees Fox looking and raises an eyebrow; Fox frowns and turns back to his datapad. 

“My contact can get them out of Coruscant,” he says. He hears the rustling of bedsheets and then Vos's warmth is at his back. Fox looks at him, again over his shoulder. Vos is and isn’t smiling at him, his familiar smirk firmly in place but his eyes far away. They glint and change, from gold to hazel, gold again.  
“One of these days,” he tells Fox, “you’ll tell me who they are.”  
Fox snorts. “No I won’t,” he says.

He carefully lays the datapad on his desk and then stands up. Vos has a handful of inches on him, and he uses them to crowd Fox against the table until the sharp plasteel edge hits the backs of his legs.  
He lets himself be crowded, and when Vos puts his big, warm hands on his hips, Fox pulls on his hair until he lowers his head enough to be kissed.

Once the kid is on a transport on their way to the Rim, Fox will clear the safehouse, and put some distance between this fragile, dangerous, growing thing between him and Vos, and himself.

But that’s a week away. He closes his eyes in the low light of his small room, feels Vos shudder under his hands, and when the other man steps closer, Fox makes room for him between his legs and opens his mouth and stops thinking, just for a while.


End file.
